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Eventhough I should practice for my exams right now, I feel more like playing Batrider. It’s a free world.

I finally got a D score the other day. While this is not very high it was already enough for #1 over at shmups.com. It’s sad to see so few good Batrider scores. I have to admit though, that playing with a team and triggering the secret bosses is the most difficult challenge I’ve yet encountered in a shmup, Garegga 1cc is a joke compared to this.

It looks like that D was totally luck and that I’m horribly inconsistent at this game. My second best score in the last 3 days was only A,3. I reach stage 5 in every 50th run or so.

Some notes and individual stage breakdown:

Stage 1 – Metro City

-around 800k before boss, no suicides.

-kill Strawman at boss. destroy all parts except the very small turrets at the left and right of the boss. Weaken these and the main body and wait until the fireturrets uncover. Destroy the boss immediately killing the two small turrets (2x30k) and the two fireturrets (2x50k) while he explodes. Sometimes the fireturrets just won’t open themselves, but if everything goes correct my score is around 1,2mill

-I’m not going for his rocket backpack yet. It seems that I destroy the boss too soon if I try. However, with the backpack and some more milking during the stage, I could get around 1,4mill.

Stage 2 – Sky High

-Trigger special shot power up during the very first enemy waves.

-Use a bomb at the missile stream before the boss, Flying Baron’s bomb seems perfct for this.

-1,5mill-1,6mill before boss

-There are two ways to milk this boss. Either you destroy the turrets that shoot the green rings asap and milk the drones for medals or you destroy them asap, weaken the boss until he opens his arms and milk the extensions for 10k each. If I haven’t died during the stage and am still using Flying Baron, I’ll go for the second technique, because I don’t want to destroy drones for the extend. Going from 2 to 3 ships in stock is a huge rank increase compared to 1 to 2. If I’m on my last ship, namely Miyamoto, I’ll go for the first milking technique and collect that extend item. After Boredom I have around 1,9mill-2mill. If Flying Baron is still alive -> suicide.

-Shoot of one side of Bashinet and milk the small rockets with aura. It’s possible to milk the razorblades during his next attack cycle for 3k each, but rather difficult to do with Miyamoto, because of his piercing options that will only give you 300 points each and thus making it worthless. I went for destroying his tail and milking the small cluster bombs earlier, but decided against it in the end. It’s not worth that much and it’s pretty much guaranteed that you lose Miyamoto there, which means, that you can’t milk Bashinet’s last form with his options.

-As already said, milk the last form with Miyamoto’s options. the third option level seems to give the most points for some strange reason. Try to shoot the missiles with shot and not with your options for 1k each. The small pods have to be destroyed with aura if Miyamoto is still alive. With Strawman it’s ok to use shot and/or options to destroy them for 6k each, because they’re both non piercing.

-2,6mill-2,7mill after stage 2

Stage 3 – Sewer

-If Miyamoto is still alive, wait until the first medal appears, collect it and suicide. This way you avoid the infamous dropping 10k medal while you’re respawning – a Raizing classic!

-To make four medals appear for each flipover turret, it’s best to activate (Strawman’s) bomb exactly when the middle turret’s laser is vanishing. I’m still having some consistency problems here and this bit still seems kind of awkward.

-Right after this, a red helicopter will appear, destroy only one of his sidepods and wait until the screen gets crowded with tons of blue helis and the two yellow mechas -> bomb. The red heli is worth 10k if destroyed with bomb. Around here, I usually get my second extend item, giving me back my Garegga character.

-I use another bomb for the three tanks (20k each) and the green house with four medals and of course a last bomb for the houses before the boss.

-Milking the boss is crucially important and it’s damn difficult. 90% of my runs end here. I dodge the first few attacks with Strawman and then suicide to weaken the turrets and get Flying Baron. Set the options to front and milk the turrets. One turret is worth 10k if destroyed with shot and you get 50k if you destroy one hatch. After some milking it’s ok to use a bomb to destroy the remaining hatches. On a good run I have around 4,5mill points before Black Heart.

-Collect the extend from the drones during Black Heart’s first form. Milking the wings with shot on frequency #60 is worth around 200k. When the second form starts, I concentrate on the boss’ weakpoint. Destroying the wings is worth 50k each, sometimes I’m getting one, usually not.

-Around 5mill after stage 3.

Stage 4 – Airport

-Ideally I want to keep Flying Baron through the whole stage, I usually fail at trying so. The stage itself has the obvious hidden medals and is kinda straightforward.

-You can combine uncovering the huge stock of medals in the middle of the stage with bombing the blue helicopters for 10k each. But because I usually miss the two big bomber items at the beginning of the stage on purpose (to trigger another extend item in stage 5), I don’t have enough bombs for this.

-5,8mill-5,9mill before boss

-It’s difficult to milk Bazzcok with Miyamoto, milking him with Flying Baron is a cakewalk though. Destroy one of his turrets first and then milk the drones for around three attack patterns of the other turret. Then destroy the other turret and milk some more. The 6mill extend should appear. If I’ve already lost Flying Baron, it’s best to collect not more than one option item or maybe even none at all for milking. 6,3mill-6,4mill before Gob-Robo.

-I’m luckily getting a bit more consistent at destroying Gob-Robo’s arms for ten 10k medals, but sometimes he still refuses to spin them.

-Around 6,5mill after stage 4 and I’m happy.

Stage 5 – Colosseum

-One of the biggest walls in the entire game

-If I have no bombs left, I’ll lose Miyamoto early on, which means that I won’t be able to fight Tsumujimaru in the highway stage. I just have to pray for an easy first form. The big green rings, the exploding snake pods – his first form is pure horror, nearly as hard as Envy.

-The second form is quite a relief in opposition to the first one. If you get lucky, you can get around 1mill points from this boss only, but I’m glad with everything above 7mill

Stage 6 – Highway

-I get a lot of extends in this stage which means that I can suicide a lot and still have all 3 characters in my team for the three rivals. First I get a score based one at 7,5mill, then I get one from a third dropped big bomber item (either from the yellow tank or from one of the Ninjas) and maybe the extend from the blue hovercraft, which I usually try to destroy, but sometimes fail at.

-Breaking my medalchain is very likely in this stage. There are a lot of really difficult places. The problem is, that you lose a lot of points in the opening bit of Zenovia City if you don’t have max medals there. There are around 30 (!) medals there. On top of that it’s difficult to build up a new chain in the highway stage (because there are close to no medals), making a chainbreak even more regretable.

-Blunt is easy, Sobut is easier, Envy is the killer.

-9mill after this stage, but I jump for joy, no matter what my score is each time I clear it.

Stage 7 – Airport2

-My favourite boss of all time just got an update and got even more dificult as he is in Garegga.

-From here on it’s all about survival, though milking this boss can give you a lot of points, maybe around 3mill.

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It’s a huge problem that I don’t have a fixed suicide distribution for stage 6 onwards yet. I need to work on that. Hoarding lives only makes Zenovia City even harder, as if it wouldn’t be hard enough already…

On another note I could easily improve my Normal mode score, but I don’t really care anymore for that, Advanced mode has to be my priority first.

Finally!

After something around 40 days Empress has arrived yesterday. Been playing it, enjoying it loving it.

The best thing is, that I finally got a stoic [L7] – Clear! After two tries which both ended at 76%, my third gave me the needed 84%. I’ve heard that this one’s probably the most difficult L7 Clear, which means that I can concentrate on Hyper now. I still don’t have a Clear on G2, but I feel that one coming aswell in the near future, fingers crossed!

Also: Cleared One more lovely on Hyper. Every diff 9 song still is a wall for me.

The game itself is fantastic and beyond all my imagination. It’s time to sell all my other mixes, because this one has simply everything. The only song I miss is Cradle from 9th style. It wasn’t really popular (thus it’s not on Empress), but I love it to bits.

With Empress in my hands I don’t feel the urge anymore to buy a 360 + Futari. I’ll save that purchase for next summer I guess. Would’ve been nice to play with all the shmups.com guys while the game’s still new, but oh well…It’ll never be too late to grab that first spot on the Ultra 1.5 table. ;)

University has started again and I have close to no time playing Garegga. Nevertheless, I try to play for an hour in the evenings and effectively planning my weekend. I’m quite confident about getting a G now, it’s just a matter of time.

 

The flamingoes: I stopped playing Garegga years ago, when I was still using Iron Makerel, solely because of these damn birds. Then I found a consistent strategy to get 2,4-2,5mill everytime with using Gain and now, with the suicide game over technique in my hands, it’s back to random frustration again.

I got 3,4-3,5mill a couple of times, with a score like that, I’m even allowed to do numerous mistakes later on, unfortunately I usually get like 2,9mill. Stuff that makes the game over technique easier and raises the chance for 3mill+ scores:

 

-Try to destroy the stage 1 boss’ front propeller. It’s difficult to do, I go the safe route with a double suicide on him. This way you can aim for 600k+ scores after stage 1 (my best is 654k atm).With around 600k you respawn faster at the flamingoes since you get the extend earlier. This is crucial, because you want to throw your first bomb after resurrection as soon as possible.

-It’s important to exactly know when to stop shooting to let one enemy live. The enemies seem to appear random, which means that if you stop shooting and the enemy is appearing on the very right of the screen, you’ll going to lose a lot of points, because you first have to wait for him to fly over and THEN drop the bomb.

-Placing the first two bombs is very important aswell. I still don’t have a feeling for the ideal placement yet. After the second bomb you should immediately ram into the enemy. At this point, it comes in handy, if you had a good stage 1 or not. If your stage 1 score was only 500k-550k, you first have to wait 0,5secs before killing yourself.

-After your resurrection you should keep an eye on the big bomber item. It often hides behind the explosion from your last bomb. While trying to collect the item, you’re allowed to drop one bomb. If you are to slow collecting the bomber item, because it’s not visible or even thrown offscreen and you can’t use the big bomber item as your second bomb, you’re going to lose a lot of points.

-After your resurrection, you have to drop three bombs in total. The sprite limit sometimes doesn’t allow a third dropped bomb, again, if this happens, big point loss. The sprite limit seems to be expired sooner the later you try to drop the bombs. Hammer the B button, as soon as you resurrect! If you didn’t ram into the enemy early enough, you now can’t drop a third bomb. Another reason why you need around 600k from stage 1…

-The placement for the latter three bombs is quite straightforward for once. You can just throw them on one spot alltogether.

 

…and even if you did everything correct, you sometimes get 500k less, just because the flamingoes hate you.

 

On another note, my Saturn froze during stage 6 boss the other day with a D,2 score and still a lot of milking to go. Would’ve been around D,5, which would’ve been perfect for a G.

OH WELL

STGT ’09 is over! It was the first STGT in which I tried to play as often as possible and actually tried to get a good team-ranking. Individual ranking sadly had to be irrelevant, since I had to miss the second week due to university stuff. Nevertheless, I thought the game selection was just splendid and I had great fun playing and talking about the games.

After the STGT I wanted to go back to Batrider, but because of a completely surprised last week that was Garegga, I’m hooked to this one again. I was able to regain all my strategies during the STGT and now it’s time to actually improve my score by more than just 30k. If I stop playing Garegga now, I maybe never come back to it again, because it just takes a lot of time to get into the game after a longer break. I have to count after how many bullets some targets die, so you can put your options to back formation in the very last second. I have to listen to the music to know when some enemies selfdestruct or when bosses time out. I have to know exact screen positioning for correctly placed bombs. There are so many little things I just don’t want to learn again. Sometimes I just wish I could record replays…

So I just had my best credit in Garegga ever. The result is a new highscore, F,5mill, but I’m not really happy, eventhough my first next goal I set myself indeed was F,5. So why am I frustrated instead of jumping through the roof? That’s mainly because this credit was perfect in every aspect (for me). I didn’t make a single mistake and I died on Glow Squid’s first form. Both of Glow Squid’s forms together give you around 500k…. 500k! That would’ve been a G score…a G score!

I didn’t break my medalchain even once, got both Mad Ball’s more or less perfect, got 3,1mill after the flamingoes using the suicide game over technique, milked Black Heart mk2 and…. died on Glow Squid!!!!

Score progression was as follows:

Stage 1: 580,000

Stage 2: 4,500,000 (3,1 after the flamingoes)

Stage 3: 6,000,000

Stage 4: 7,800,000

Stage 5: B,500,000

Stage 6: D,500,000

Stage 7: F,567,320 (E before BHMKII)

I had at least three stupid and avoidable deaths: One at Junkey Monkey, one at the many turret section where Glow Squid bursts out and a last one at BHMKII’s first form. I always am so nervous when my score is high and I reach the last boss, but this time, it was another level of nervousness, I could already feel G!

The main problem I have with replicating such a run are the damned flamingoes. Sometimes I get only 2,5mill from them and only like 1/20 of the time I have over 3mill, which I’ll definitely need for a G score now. It’s just so damn random and makes it overly frustrating. On top of that I break my medalchain there very often, it doesn’t seem controllable to any extent.

Anyway, I’m just a bit pissed atm, it’ll probably take months to get that kind of credit again, if I haven’t already stopped playing again by then.

Beatmania iidx Empress got released a few days ago, but I don’t want to start somwething new, when I haven’t finished this one.

We’ll see if this story gets a happy end.

I still love you Garegga!!!

xxx

-Plasmo

Bemani games are boring to write about, that’s why I don’t.

I improved a lot in Beatmania, I can clear most of the songs on level 8 and a few on level 9, with Quasar being the hardest I guess. iidx is just perfect for a short abstinence from shooters or just to relax a few mins on a busy day. I don’t get so obsessed with them and I feel no pressure. That’s probably because I’m not hunting down these AAA ranks and my gaming niveau is quite low compared to others. Nevertheless, I miss something that only shmups can give me. It’s the theoretical approach, it’s the thinking about the game when you’re not playing it, working out good scoring routes, reading strategy guides. Shmups have (at least for me) much more to offer. That doesn’t mean that Bemani games are less entertaining, they’re just less interesting in general. Does that even make sense?! I’ll keep playing them, that’s for sure, but I’m afraid I’ll never play these games on a high level. Maybe this is actually a good thing, time for gaming is becoming more and more scarce for me…

Or maybe it’s just because I LOVE SHMUPS!

Bemani games are boring to write about, that’s why I don’t.

BATRIDER

I finally got around to aim for my Summer Goal, namely clearing Advance mode with a team instead of the plain Strawman approach. The first day (yesterday) was a disaster, I wasn’t even able to clear stage 2… I figured out that it was probably because I tried every difficult milking strategy right from the start. Today I got the basics down again, and I’m refining my strategies for the first 5 stages (6 if you count colosseum). On my best run, I got to the first ninja on the highway with a score of 7mill, that’s only 1,5mill shy off the 17mill replay from superplay.co.uk. Enough for a D or E score I think.

Stage 1: I usually get around 1mill, If I learn some advanced milking techniques and try to destroy his backpack, I can get around 1,4mill. Right now I couldn’t care less, too much effort for such a small increase – not worth it YET.
Sky High Stage: Since I’m playing the Korean B version, I have some problems destroying the blue ships to activate Bashinet. I’m just not having enough firepower. I really need a special power up there, maybe not that good for rank management, but there’s nothing I can do. I’m not milking Boredom, but I try to milk the small missiles during Bashinet’s first form, which actually is quite easy once you have some sort of routine.
Sewer Stage: The level itself is pretty much straightforward. I have to work on destroying more of the big enemies with aura, could be worth it. The boss is much more interesting though, milking Deviate is essentially important and can give you up to 800k alone! However, you have to use a Batrider ship and one mistake can cost you Black Heart. I’m concentrating on getting all the secret bosses first, but sooner or later I definitely have to come back to milking this boss.
Airport Stage: Not much to say here. Milking Bazzcok isn’t as hard as I thought and I’m getting better at shooting Gob Robo’s balls (!) for the 10 extra medals. Timing is everything.
Colosseum: Bashinet2′s first form is a complete bitch and imo has the hardest attack patterns right after Envy of course. Breaking my medalchain here is very likely, I’ll work on that.

The Highway Stage itself still is a mess. I don’t know if I should destroy the hovercraft or get the extend and I’m messing up the end quite often. Haven’t thought about the bossrush yet.

Since I don’t really have any time to devote myself to one shooter these days, I tend to play Bemani games, if I find maybe 30mins in the evening to play videogames.

I’m not really good at these type of games, but I find them very enjoyable for some reason. So after a few weeks of not playing, today I finally played some Beatmania IIDX again (6th style). IIDX is one of the most brutal games ever created, it seems like the ultimate challenge to me. If you thought it was difficult to get into Ibara, try playing IIDX, you won’t clear anything even after hours and hours of playing.  Seeing Rubbinnexx clearing V on Expert at some german Bemani meeting was one of the most impressive feats I ever saw.

So for myself, I finally got the Clear on Colors (Radio Edit) on Light7 today and cleared my first two diff 6 songs on Arcade mode. Right now I’m missing maybe 4-5 Clears on Light7 and everything on Arcade with diff 6 and above is simply ripping me apart. Right now I’m only playing for the Clears, getting an A or better is just not my cup of tea. I can’t see myself getting any better at this game, but I guess it’s all about persistence and willpower again. This game is just so much fun, I’ll just keep playing it till forever.

Regarding Dance Dance Revolution, I can now consistenly get a B on Max 300 (no bar, of course), but I’m not really motivated to jump around when it’s like 30°C outside.

EDIT:

Just got a Full Combo on Starmine Light7, yay.

Right now I’m Betatesting the already released game DUX aka the biggest failure ever. Since I got used to like games everyone hates, I thought about how it would be fun playing this nonstop for the next few days.

I’m talking to RHE on a daily basis now and besides the obvious stuff:

-counterstop

-you can not not continue

I’ve made several other suggestions, like:

-lower the hitpoints of some enemies (especially stage 2 and stage 5)

-disable checkpoint milking (there’ll be a bonus for each remaining life after 1CCing the game)

The scoring system consists of two parts. The first one kinda reminds me of Psyvariar’s and is all about collecting bullets when being in hyper soaking mode. The more bullets you collect, the longer you’ll stay in this mode. While small bullets give you more points, big bullets give you more energy. When you soak up multiple bullets at once, the points are multiplied (small bullets) or summed up (big bullets).

The other half of the scoring system was borrowed straight from Last Hope: Hold fire button and release to shoot a bigger shot. With this shot, try to destroy as many enemies as possible and the values of each enemy will be multiplied with depending on when the enemy was hit.

I had two ideas for making the first part of the scoring system more interesting and challenging.

1. When you enter hyper soaking mode, every bullet’s value will be multiplied by the number of bullets already collected within one hyper mode time. If hyper mode is over, the multiplier resets and drops to 0 again.

-> Having it this way, one would try to prevent ever getting out of hyper mode. That means you would’ve to carefully soak up all bullets, shoot every energy-container at the right moment and chain through whole levels. This would’ve been a mix between Psyvariar and Guwange/Mars Matrix.

2. When you enter hyper soaking mode, the number of all bullets absorbed in this mode will add to a seperate counter. Now the points from each enemy destroyed, will be multiplied by this counter. Once you leave hyper mode, the multiplier resets and drops to 0 again.

-> Similiar to my first idea, one would want the hyper mode not to stop and build up a high counter first, before destroying bigger enemies. With this scoring system the regular enemy chaining could be ignored.

Both ideas would, in my opinion, add great depth and a lot more strategic planning to the game. It’s not a rare case that I find myself trying to stay in hyper mode for the whole first stage, would be nice to get a reward for that…

Unfortunately both ideas will not be used for the re-release of DUX.